Tag: self-improvement

The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.

From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

On its surface, Crazy Rich Asians is a sordid story of dysfunction and social positioning within mega-wealthy sorta-nobility Chinese families originating in Singapore. It’s full of flashy outfits and the shocking shopping trips that put them in the characters wardrobes; over-the-top square footage and fully-furnished living arrangements in a part of the world known for nearly inhumane density and some of the highest real estate prices in the world; petty gossip like only those with too much time and money on their hands can engage in; oh, and wonderful, wonderful sounding food. For those reasons, it’s an entertaining read.

But just below the surface (not too far, mind you… these issues are philosophically auxiliary as far as I can tell, not intentionally contemplative like a work of classic literature) lie a series of family-planning and wealth-planning puzzles for the observant reader to consider. In no particular order, and with very minor spoilers, these puzzles are explored more below.

The first puzzle has to do with identity. When one of the main characters finds out that the early story of their family’s history is a fabrication, they are thrown into psychological turmoil and shock, their sense of self seemingly obliterated in a moments revelation. It begs the question “Who are you?” One answer is, you are your history, a series of factual contexts and accumulated decisions made up to any point in time at which you exist. Another answer is, you are whatever you believe you are– if you can convince yourself you are, than you are. This question is important for a few reasons. The first is that the way our brains function on a psychological level may require us to have certain beliefs about ourselves to maintain psychological integrity and thus enable us for other modes of action in the external world. We may be able to “constantly reinvent ourselves”, but only within a narrow band of experience or possibility, beyond that we are driven at a hardware level into anxiety and distress. Another reason this question is important is because it sheds light on how arbitrary our identities can be. If we can operate quite competently and confidently with a certain view of ourselves and our role in the world, even if this viewpoint is built on falsehoods, it suggests that what is important in terms of forming an identity is consistency of story, not accuracy. If someone can convince you you are the rightful king, maybe you are. If you come from a noble family but you’re told you’re a lout, maybe you will be. Where does one find “self” in all of this?

Related to this puzzle is parental relationships and the question, “Do you really want to know everything about your parents?” Each one of us is born into a world our parents have already been living for some time. We don’t know all the choices and ideas they had prior to our arrival and often we receive a filtered list of such information sporadically throughout our lives. We don’t have the ability to query our parents’ true thinking at any given moment and without becoming paranoid and running background checks or doing some sleuthing on them, we’re mostly in a position to accept what they tell us about themselves unless we receive some kind of alarmingly contradictory information that would lead us to question it. Similar to finding out your life might have been a lie, do we want to know who our parents really are? We presume they share the good about themselves with us, do we really want to hear about more of their foibles?

The second puzzle is about intergenerational wealth building. The narrative focuses on Singaporean Chinese families of stupendous wealth. Most of this wealth seems to be owned and controlled by surviving matriarchs whose heyday was the 1930s and 1940s (Gen1). The descendants (Gen2) and their children (Gen 3) appear to be idlers. Sure, some of them have “jobs” and other preoccupations, but none of them have to work and none seem to be contributing anything productive to the family wealth, which appears to be managed professionally by outsiders.

Why don’t rich families prepare future generations to manage their wealth responsibly? When the matriarch dies, what will keep the professional managers loyal, and what will give the surviving descendants the ability to manage these obligations without undue risk? Money is clearly important to these families, as they could give it away or have less of it but they don’t. But there doesn’t appear to be a meaningful attempt to teach the succeeding generations how to contribute to its growth and management.

Related to this is the question of what is the value of fantastic wealth? Although they think of themselves quite highly, the families depicted don’t seem to be better at much of anything that doesn’t involve buying things. In terms of character they have the same flaws and struggles as everyone else. If this wealth can’t make you a better person, or, put another way, you don’t use it to enable greater self-actualization, of what use is it? Ironically, wealth in this story is depicted as not creating conditions by which those who possess it can elevate themselves, but simultaneously it explores the ways wealth changes a person in terms of tastes and behaviors. Here we see not how a person’s values change, but the ways in which their ability to express those values do. If you don’t use it to become a better version of yourself, and you don’t learn how to manage and control it, what logical benefits does wealth offer you?

The final puzzle of the story is the puzzle of permanent capital. As none of the major characters and their families seem to contribute to the generation of their wealth, and none seem capable of doing so, where the wealth comes from and how it manages to persist, especially as it is being consumed at such enormous rates, is a bit of a mystery. Of course, in this story we can only see the families whose wealth has persisted across multiple generations despite all of the above-mentioned conditions and despite the changes in social and economic circumstances over decades. What we can not see are the families whose wealth ran aground over this period, because they won’t factor into a narrative about those who have great wealth except as a tale of warning which never seems to be told. It is amateurish and perhaps speaks to the intelligence or values of the intended reader but the author never provides even a small hint as to where the wealth comes from (oh sure, some new money families introduced here and there are the Such and Suchs of plastics, or the So and Sos of tech).

Though friends with government officials and even extant royalty, the primary families are disclaimed as not being of purely aristrocratic extraction or otherwise connected directly to a government-based wealth extraction mechanism. But from where else could such voluminous and seemingly interminable wealth emanate from, especially without influence or concern of the family? If such a source exists in the market (a contradiction in terms at the very least), how is it undiscovered by other market participants and thus immune to competitive factors? How is it financed?

In studying great exceptions there is an honest temptation to find some kind of exploitable rule. But I think it’s ultimately a fool’s errand, because you’re essentially looking at a highly improbable stack of luck and trying to figure out how to emulate something that is amazing that it even exists at all.

[amazon text=How To Read A Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading&asin=0671212095]

by Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, published 1972

“Literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well”

HTRAB seeks to be a remedy for those described above who have read many books but understood little of any of them. As the authors define it, good reading is active reading, that is, it involves note-taking and and highlighting (write in your books to make them truly yours) and question-asking, with the ultimate question being, “What has the author tried to communicate to me and, assuming I’ve understood him, what do I think of what he has said?” A book is an absent teacher– it is ultimately your responsibility to answer on your own and for yourself the questions you might pose to it.

The 4 levels of reading

The authors set out four levels of reading, which are hierarchical in terms of complexity and skill required, and cumulative, in the sense that each level includes the skills and complexity of those below it while adding unique qualities of its own. The levels are:

Elementary

Inspectional

Analytical

Syntopical

Elementary reading is exactly what it sounds like, the most basic level of reading that all people learning to read initially experience. At this level of reading, one begins to comprehend the letters and words they form as being connected to or representative of concepts, actions, etc. Unfortunately, at this level of reading, comprehension doesn’t go much beyond this and even more tragically, few readers ever seem to graduate beyond this level, even during and after time spent in college. For elementary readers, books are full of words one must step and stumble over, but little meaning is ever found in them.

Inspectional reading is the beginning of true “reading for understanding”, which is the kind of reading HTRAB is primarily focused on. Inspectional reading is both a level of sophistication and a specific tool that can be used to heighten overall understanding and reading skill for one who “reads well.” It is a skill in the sense that an inspectional reader is able to draw out of a book its essential meaning and something about the way in which the author goes about it (as opposed to an elementary reader, who never quite gets that far, missing the meaning forest for the crowd of symbolic trees). It is a specific tool in that inspectional reading entails a deliberate process by which a reader examines the preface and introductory material of the book (or the first few pages) and the conclusion or epilogue (or last few pages) in detail, surveys the table of contents (if available) and index to get a feel for the overall structure, order and topics covered in the book and then jumps around at random through the middle of the book reading passages and pages of interest that appear to be central to the author’s theme and argument. In this way, an inspectional reader quickly learns what the book is about, how the author goes about elaborating upon it and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not it’s a message and artifice worthy of the readers attention and time.

Without this process, or at a minimum, familiarizing oneself with the table of contents, a reader who starts at the first page and tries to plow through is only making his reading more challenging because he is attempting to learn what he is attempting to understand (the topic and structure), at the same time that he is trying to understand it.

The three primary questions answered by an inspectional (summary) reading are:

What kind of book is it?

What is it about as a whole?

What is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?

Tools to prepare you for reading well

The authors suggest four essential questions to be asked by an active reader:

What is the book about as a whole?

What is being said in detail, and how?

Is the book true, in whole or in part?

What of it?

These are questions the reader should have always in the back of his mind as he reads, and which he should be able to answer confidently by the time he finishes.

The authors also recommend several techniques for “making a book your own”:

Underline major points and forceful statements

Make vertical lines in the margins for passages worthy of quoting at length

Stars, asterisks or other markings in the margins where the ten or twelve most critical points are made throughout the book

Numbers in the margin to catalog the points of an argument being made sequentially

Numbers of other pages in the margin indicating where in the text an idea is revisited or referenced

Circling of key words or phrases, similar to underlining

Writing in the margin or top or bottom of the page or at the end of a chapter as endnotes, to record questions (and answers), a simplified thesis of what you have read or to catalog a sequential argument in concentrated form

Several other techniques and methods are discussed in HTRAB which are critical to reading well. One is to study the title of the book and learn what you can from it. Authors usually take care in naming their books and the titles give significant clues about what the book is and is not about. Another is to practice stating the unity of the book– in a sentence or a paragraph at most, explain what kind of book it is, what it is about and list the devices the author employs to explore that theme. A final tool is to keep in mind the author’s intentions at all times– every book is written ostensibly to solve a problem, which the book is supposed to be a solution for, which begs the questions, “What is the problem the author wanted to solve by writing his book?” and “What solution does he offer to the problem in writing his book?”

The process of analytical reading

The third level of reading, and the most critical for all who wish to learn to read well, is the analytical level. At the analytical level, the primary intention of the reader is to be thorough, complete and to read for understanding. Some of the tools previously discussed are, in fact, part of the analytical reading toolkit. In total, the process or “rules” for analytical reading are:

Classify the book according to kind and subject matter

State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity

Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole

Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve

Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words

Grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences

Know the author’s arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences

Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not; and as to the latter, decide which the author knew he had failed

Do not begin criticism until you have completed your outline and interpretation of the book (do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say, “I understand.”)

Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously

Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make

For criticism, special criteria apply such as: show wherein the author is misinformed, uninformed, illogical or incomplete

I made a note of some other helpful tips for reading well analytically:

the important words (in the sense of being critical to the author’s argument) are the one’s that give you the most trouble

one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it

if you never ask yourself any questions about a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you insights you did not already possess

it is best to do all you can without outside help because if you act on this principle consistently you will find you need less and less of it (and take more and more from your reading)

Bringing it all together: syntopical reading

Syntopical reading is the reading of multiple books, with similar topics, in order to synthesize a “conversation” amongst and between the authors. The beauty of this method of reading is it allows one to pit perspectives and arguments from differing backgrounds and even differing time periods into one intellectual commons. It also allows the reader to get a “full measure” of the literary world’s treatment of a given subject. It can be performed by either multi-inspectional reading of various titles, or multi-analytical reading of those same titles.

The steps of a successful syntopical reading are:

Creative a tentative bibliography of your subject

Inspect all of the books in the bibliography to ensure they’re germane and to get a clearer perspective of the subject itself

Inspect the books amassed to find the most relevant passages to the subject matter

Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology that all authors can be assumed to agree with, even if they didn’t employ such terminology themselves

Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted to have provided answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not

Define the issues, major and minor, by lining up the authors’ respective viewpoints on one side or another

Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues so as to throw maximum light on the subject

An afterword

Despite my efforts at being analytical, this review was something of an inspectional survey itself. One thing I took away from my reading is that I do a lot of the things mentioned in the analytical reading process, although I actually neglect a lot of the inspectional reading elements and now realize their value. The reading also confirmed some of my biases by throwing into stark relief the inadequacies of many other people’s reading efforts I am aware of, either from direct personal experience or via interaction with their “interpretations” of ideas gleaned from things they have read. It is somewhat dismaying to realize how few intellectual opponents would qualify as “well read” analytical book users, and how inadequate their attempts at criticism are in light of this. One would be more satisfied to think one’s opponents were both more competent, and more honest, than that.

At the end of HTRAB, the authors provide a number of special tips for the reading of specific kinds of works (poems and plays, history, social science, hard science and math, etc.), as well as a bibliography of “great books” (similar to that found here) and a short essay on what reading well can do for an individual. Aside from the hopefully true suggestion that the mind-exercise provided by reading well can actually help one sustain the vitality and quality of their life even into old age, the discussion of the growing relationship one can develop with truly “great” books is comforting, as well. I think for me personally this passage resonated because of my own experiences reading what I refer to as “acts of philosophy” even when their subject matter is not philosophy per se (endlessly re-readable books like [amazon text=Security Analysis&asin=007141228X] and [amazon text=Human Action&asin=1610161459] which seem to give up new secrets and ideas with each new pass through).

Despite my epistemological misgivings about HTRAB (for example, could HTRAB, in and of itself, assist a person currently capable of nothing more than elementary reading to rise above themselves?), I do believe it itself is a title worth revisiting in the future. My first foray amongst its pages was admittedly quick and inspectional, and there were many passages I will admit I skipped just so I could get to the end and get this up on my blog. It may or may not be a “great” book (I believe I will suspend judgment on that for now), it is undoubtedly a “good” book with much to recommend it and I would encourage anyone who is interested, as well as my future self, to pick it up and give it a read.

The contents of this post are adapted from e-mail correspondence with an acquaintance.

To give some context, this e-mail was prompted by a friend who made the point that our (by then) lengthy discussion on theoretical economic and political concepts was not a productive use of time and was little more than mental masturbation. In replying to this insistence (and attempting to refute more of what I saw as fallacious arguments), I tried to plead the case for caring about stuff like economic or political theory, esoteric or otherwise.

I wanted to make the case that these ideas had real, practical validity in our everyday lives, not just in the narrow halls of academia or someplace equally arbitrary and detached from the real world of everyday issues:

On the contrary, I believe these discussions can always be a constructive use of time if they lead one or both parties closer to an understanding of the truth on a given issue. I don’t know if Mises was the first to say it, and certainly he wasn’t the only one because Ayn Rand articulated a similar philosophy, but he had a slogan, “Ideas move society.” Over time, the structure of production and the political system overarching any society will come to be informed by the prevalent ideas held by its individual members.

In a grand and very real sense, every erroneous idea we hold takes us a little bit further from a harmonious, progressing, civilized society, while every truthful idea we hold takes us a little bit closer. This is not a matter of elegant armchair theory but of cold, hard, factual reality and it is all a consequence of Mises’s famous dictim, “Man acts.”

Every man acts, this is an inescapable fact of life. But what every man acts upon, well, that is informed by the ideas he holds and the values he determines to be worth pursuing.

We live in a time of gross ignorance of many simple truths, among the bitterest of which happen to be economic laws of cause and effect. Unfortunately, we also live with the consequences of this ignorance. It is not our duty in a universal, cosmic sense, but it is our obligation in a means-end sense, that if we wish to push back this tide of ignorance and live our lives on the dry-land of reason, we must fight it with sea walls of truth, not attempt to gather it up in fishermen’s nets of half-truth, pseudo-reason and arbitrary preference. Only consistent, logically-sound ideas can replace the fallacious if hope of progress is to be made, else you simply replace one flawed system with another.

I take a personal interest in the ideas of people who fascinate me because I think it is a natural implication to be curious about the beliefs and reasons of those I respect, and because in my own quest for truth and understanding I try to be ever vigilant that I may not have all the facts and perhaps someone can respectfully cross me on something I thought was true and show me why it is not. I am not content to simply say “My mind is made up” and carry on merrily when someone claims the truth is not my own.

This is why I have made an honest and sincere attempt to engage you on this subject and others in the past. I feel if you are to be my acquaintance and in some ways my friend, and if I am to respect your judgment in things, I must test you on these matters for the good of us both.

We all act, all day, every day. The actions we choose are based upon our values and our values are informed by our understanding of truth. Our understanding of truth, by shaping our values which inform which actions we take and when, has a direct, tangible bearing on the practical manner in which we live our lives.

[amazon text=The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing&asin=1607747308]

by Marie Kondo, published 2014

This is a work of philosophy under cover of personal organization and household habit. The question at the center of the book is “Why do you own what you own?” Put more bluntly, it is, “Why do you have so much stuff you don’t use and never will?” If those don’t seem like profound questions, maybe you don’t live your life and enjoy your material existence in a thoughtful way.

The book’s weakness, ironically, is in the specific tidying, folding and organizing methods Kondo advocates. Reading on Kindle, I did not find any helpful pictures or diagrams (but thankfully, there is a wealth of videos on YouTube where people have demonstrated her techniques) and I found the text-explanations of how to fold or where to store different things in a closet generally confusing. I believe my confusion will be relieved with some practice and patience in experimenting with different techniques over time. But if you’re hoping to learn the “KonMari Method” for folding, storing and the like, I don’t think this book is the best resource.

Instead, the book’s strength is its principles– always key to the strength of any philosophical work. Kondo suggests a general method for tidying one’s living space– start with your own possessions, then move to shared possessions; begin with clothes, then work through to other easily accumulated items such as books, kitchen and toilet supplies and finally to trinkets and trash; when tidying by category, locate ALL such possessions throughout the home and dump them in a pile on the floor before sorting. Anyone can grasp the principles of this method regardless of their specific circumstances. Her criteria for keeping things (note: this is a positive criteria, NOT a negative criteria for determining what to eliminate) is to hold the object and ask oneself, “Does this spark joy?” It seems ambiguous, emotional… subjective. But that’s the point! It’s a deeply individual approach to tidying. Neither Kondo nor anyone else can tell you what objects bring happiness to your life and which you can do without, you have to sense that on your own.

As a rational person I was alarmed by this at first. It seemed goofy and mystic, maybe not even serious. “Spark joy”, I don’t think in those terms. But I gave it some time and realized it made sense. I started thinking about shirts and sweaters and pants I look for an excuse to wear. I have a pair of corduroys, for example, that almost make me excited for cold weather. And then I have articles that are just taking up space in my dresser and closet, items that I can never seem to find a good opportunity to use them but nonetheless I keep holding on to them because they still fit and they are nice and in good condition. But every sweater I have that I don’t wear and won’t get rid of is another sweater I can’t acquire that I might actually enjoy.

When Kondo pointed out the cost of storing all this useless stuff, I was floored. I would never pay for a “self-storage” unit somewhere, or turn my garage into anything other than a place to put my car. In fact, I regularly shake my head when I peer into neighbor’s open garages as I walk past with my dog seeing them bulging with stacked crap all the way up to the door. What on earth are these people thinking? They’re never going to use this stuff!!

But then I realized that all the items I keep around my home that I have no use for is effectively absorbing part of my rent each month– I am paying to store these items! And what’s worse, as Kondo points out, much of the time these are items I bought in bulk to “save money” but which are in such significant supply that they will last me multiple months if not years. I am effectively floating the manufacturer’s inventory and parking part of it in my home, or thought of another way, I am subsidizing his production by buying several items I don’t really need and won’t ever use with each one I do need. Rather than saving money, I am costing myself– once for buying more than I needed and twice for paying to store it in my home. For me, I’d argue a third time with the emotional cost of being aware of and surrounded by these unused possessions that continually fail to “spark joy.” Just the other day I bought a pack of 12 pens for annotating books as I read. I was unhappy with my previous pens and wanted to try something new. I didn’t need 12 pens, I needed 1 or 2. But I bought 12 for around $10 because I was “saving” money over buying a pack of 3 for $5. The problem is, it turns out I kind of hate these pens and now I have enough to last me a couple years at my current rate of use. Kondo made this so clear to me!

Another startling revelation was the way I’ve shifted some of my own tidying burden to family members. It’s hard to visit my childhood home at times because my parents have a bad case of hoarding. But I’ve had no problem storing my finished or unread books in an unused room of the house I used to occupy when I occasionally stop by. One part of me has been mentally scolding my parents for hoarding and not cleaning up their living space. But another part of me has been dumping off my own clutter on them, completely unaware! I have resolved to go over there and dump a bunch of the stuff that remains.

While I am excited to declutter clothes (and look forward to the opportunity to purchase new articles I might actually enjoy wearing with the newly freed space), hallway closets, linen storage, bathroom and kitchen cupboards and more, one area I struggled with was her suggestion for decluttering one’s library. I love books. Or, rather, I love the idea of reading my books. But Kondo helped me clarify another meaningful point– many of the books I purchase and do not read were meant only to gratify my own ego, ie, “It’d be so great to know more about X.” When I purchase a book and don’t read it for months, I probably won’t read it ever. The inspiration and desire to study that topic has come and gone. I have made the mistake, time and time again, of purchasing far more books than I could ever hope to read and that I will ever be able to sustain an interest in. It’s wasteful.

There are a few books I really do enjoy and which I will read again. There are books I’d like to keep which I may not read again, but which I believe my children will gain a benefit from studying at an appropriate time in their life as I did. You can argue that it’d be better to buy them their own copy at that time, which is true, but this is a limited case in which I am okay holding on to a few titles for them in the meanwhile. But most of the books I own that I haven’t read yet, won’t get read– they’ll remain as costly monuments to an ambition not realized. And many more which I have read and absorbed from them what I can will similarly sit on my shelves unused as a monument to the hope that there is more juice to squeeze. But the pulp is dry at this point. I have made another resolution, which is to keep the few titles I know I will re-read because I’ve re-read in the past, the few titles I want to share with my kids and the few titles I am excited to read in the next month or two at my normal pace of reading. Everything else (read, unread) is getting sold or donated. I want to have a limited library of titles that “spark joy” and feel good to see on my shelf and not a stack of paper that I subconsciously feel a burden to get to as some kind of project.

Marie Kondo’s “Life Changing Magic” invites us to live our lives more consciously and to purchase, use and store with purpose. Any book that helps me to resolve logical contradictions in my own thoughts and actions is valuable to me. I took far more away from this book than I thought I would going into it given that I already have a reputation for being a neat freak!

These quotes are derived from [amazon text=The Meditations&asin=048629823X] (buy on Amazon.com, also free on the web) of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

From the Meditations:

Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All of these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.

Since it is possible you may depart from life this very minute, regulate every act and thought accordingly.

A man then must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.

It is in your power whenever you choose to retire into yourself. For there is no retreat which is quieter or freer from trouble than a man’s own soul.

Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, “I have been harmed.” Take away the complaint, “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away.

How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself, that it may be just and pure.

Look not round at the depraved morals of others, but run straight along the line without deviating from it.

On every occasion a man should ask himself, Is this one of the unnecessary things? Now a man should take away not only unnecessary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts so that superfluous acts will not follow after.

Time is like a river made up of the events that happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another thing comes in its place, and this will be carried away, too.

Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.

“I am unhappy, because this has happened to me.” Not so: say, “I am happy, though this has happened to me, because I continue free from pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearing the future.”

Remember, too, on every occasion that leads you to vexation to apply this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but to bear it nobly is good fortune.

In the morning, when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being.

Do not be disgusted, dissatisfied or discouraged if you do not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when you have failed, return again, and be content if the greater part of what you do is consistent with man’s nature, and love this to which you return.

Where a man can live, there also he can live well.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

Are you angry with him whose armpits stink? Are you angry with him whose mouth smells foul? What good will this anger do you? He has such a mouth, he has such armpits: it is necessary that such an emanation must come from such things.

Consider if you have hitherto behaved to all in such a way that this way be said of you: Never has he wronged a man in deed or word.

The best way of avenging yourself is not to become like the wrongdoer.

If it is difficult to accomplish something by yourself, do not think that it is impossible for man: but if anything is possible for man and conformable to his nature, think that this can be attained by you, too.

Let us overlook many things in those who are like antagonists in the gymnasium. For it is in our power, as I said, to get out of the way and to have no suspicion or hatred.

When you wish to delight yourself, think of the virtues of those who live with you; for instance, the activity of one, the modesty of another, the liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a fourth.

It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgments.

Do not let the future disturb you, for you will arrive there, if you arrive, with the same reason you now apply to the present.

Whatever any one does or says, I must be good, just as if the emerald (or the gold or the purple) were always saying, “Whatever any one does or says, I must be emerald and keep my color.”

Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change?

In a little while you will have forgotten everything; in a little while everything will have forgotten you.

When a man has done you wrong, immediately consider what opinion about good or evil he has. For when you have seen this, you will pity him, and will neither wonder nor be angry.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig.

The art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s, in respect of this, that it should stand ready and firm to meet onsets that are sudden and unexpected.

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men’s badness, which is impossible.

Receive wealth or prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let it go.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.

Practice that also wherein you have no expectation of success. For even the left hand, which is ineffectual for all other things for want of practice, holds the bridle more vigorously than the right hand; for it has been practiced in this.

How ridiculous and what a stranger he is who is surprised at anything that happens in life.

If it is not right, do not do it: if it is not true, do not say it. For let your impulse be in your own power.

Consider that everything is opinion and opinion is in your power. Take away then, when you choose, your opinion, and like a mariner who has rounded the headland, you will find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.

Cast away opinion and you are saved. Who then hinders you from casting it away?

How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man! On what a small clod of the whole earth you creep! Consider nothing to be great except to act as your nature leads you.